CTA200H

This course is for summer undergraduates performing research in astrophysics at University of Toronto. The goal is to provide training to help students be successful with the computation aspects of their summer research program.

Table of Contents Logistics Instructors Timetable Homeworks Using the System

Logistics

The course will run every afternoon from 1:30pm to 5:30pm, from Tuesday May 3 to Friday May 13. This 4-hour block will be split into two hours of lecture followed by two hours of tutorial time, in which students will work on their course homework.

Location: MP 257 -- computer lab on the 2nd floor of the physics building.

Instructors

• Course coordinator: Alex van Engelen -- engelen at cita utoronto ca
• Tutorial TA: Heather Fong -- hfong at cita utoronto ca
• Lecturers:
  • Alex van Engelen -- engelen at cita utoronto ca
  • Claire Xu -- xyu at cita utoronto ca
  • Mike Nolta -- mike at nolta net
  • Niels Oppermann -- niels at cita utoronto ca
  • Joel Meyers -- jmeyers at cita utoronto ca
  • Dan Tamayo -- dtamayo at cita utoronto ca

Timetable

This is a list of dates and topics for the course. (Preliminary -- subject to change.)

Date	Instructor	Topic
1. Tues May 3	Claire (brief intro by Alex)	Scientific computing workflow in Linux
2. Weds May 4	Alex	Language intro example: python
3. Thurs May 5	Alex	Intro to Numerical Computing
4. Fri May 6	Mike	High-performance Computing (Scinet)
5. Mon May 9	Alex	Statistics and Data Analysis Tools
6. Tues May 10	Niels	Monte Carlo Methods
7. Weds May 11	Alex	Fourier Methods
8. Thurs May 12	Dan	Machine Learning
9. Fri May 13	Joel	Symbolic Computation

Homeworks

In the first week students will work on a homework problem set related to the first week's lectures. For the second week they will work on a week-long project that will be closely related to the research they do for the rest of the summer. They will hand in their results for this project at the end of the course.

The first problem set can be found here. The due date has been moved to 1:30pm on Tuesday May 10.

The guidelines for the second-week project can be found here. The projects themselves are here.

Using the System

See this page on how to use the computing resources.